I have neither the time, nor the energy, nor the mental capacity, nor the patience, nor the endurance to follow and rebut every ill conceived, juvenile, simplistic, distraction-prone, random assemblage of words uttered from the pampered child that currently occupies the White House. But as the latest act of foolishness and ignorance concerns the topic of historical knowledge, and the historical profession writ large, I'll address this by excerpting articles from History News Network and other venues. It is also worth commenting here because it is a topic in which I have developed some expertise.

For those who don't know, the mantra "ignorance is strength" comes from Orwell's 1984, still one of my favorite books from my senior year of high school. Notice that the overwhelming majority of academic, scholarly historians are in agreement: this was a terribly misinformed, ignorant statement put forth by the President* Trump, something that occurs on pretty much a semi-daily frequency. I have a connection, however tenuous, with every historian cited in these stories. Yale historian David Blight's reaction, shown below, is particularly on point in my view. His classic, Race and Reunion, sits on my bookshelf and is standard reading in graduate school. I met Blight briefly at the Huntington Library in Pasadena. His arguments on memory, race, and the "Lost Cause" appear in my lecture on Reconstruction. Meachem's book, American Lion, sits on my shelf, I took one of Rauchway's classes (where we read his Murdering McKinley) while an undergraduate at UC Davis, and have followed--and interacted briefly with--the omnipresent Nicole Hemmer on Twitter.

This is from Yahoo! News, May 1, 2017: Historians Monday valiantly tried, and mostly failed, to understand and interpret President Trump’s remarks about President Andrew Jackson. Among other comments, Trump seemed to assert that Jackson, who died in 1845, could have prevented the Civil War, which began in 1861, and that the causes of the bloodiest conflict in the nation’s history have not been addressed or discussed.“I mean, had Andrew Jackson been a little later, you wouldn’t have had the Civil War,” said Trump in an interview with the Washington Examiner’s Salena Zito. “He was a very tough person, but he had a big heart, and he was really angry that he saw what was happening with regard to the Civil War. He said, ‘There’s no reason for this.’ People don’t realize, you know, the Civil War, you think about it, why? People don’t ask that question. But why was there the Civil War? Why could that one not have been worked out?”The comments, published Monday morning and broadcast on SiriusXM Radio, led to confusion over Trump’s understanding of Jackson’s beliefs and general American history.“First of all, historians have actually talked about the reasons for the Civil War quite a bit,” said Kevin Kruse, a professor of history at Princeton, in an email to Yahoo News. “Second, there’s an overwhelming consensus among historians that the Civil War came about because of slavery. Simply put, the war came because the southern states seceded, and they seceded — as they quite clearly said themselves at the time, over and over again — because of slavery. Mississippi’s secession declaration, to take just one, is quite direct here: ‘Our position is thoroughly identified with the institution of slavery — the greatest material interest of the world.’”“The question of why the Civil War should have happened is not only central to the study of U.S. history but to our entire national mythology,” said Eric Rauchway, a professor of history at UC Davis, in an interview with Yahoo News, “and Lincoln’s answer to that question is literally chiseled on the walls of the Lincoln Memorial about a mile’s walk from the White House.”“Historians of the U.S. were surprised to learn that nobody asks why the Civil War happened, as it’s one of the central questions of American history,” said Nicole Hemmer, assistant professor at the University of Virginia’s Miller Center, to Yahoo News. “It’s even featured on the test for American citizenship. But when Donald Trump marvels at the ignorance or incuriosity of the masses, what he’s really doing is expressing his own ignorance and incuriosity. He’s saying that he’s never asked about the origins of the Civil War.”Jon Meacham, author of “American Lion: Andrew Jackson in the White House,” attempted to parse Trump’s historical commentary.“The president seems to be conflating two things,” said Meacham in an email to Yahoo News. “The first is Andrew Jackson’s determined stand for the Union against South Carolina nullifiers in 1832-33; Old Hickory believed in the primacy of his federal government and faced down John C. Calhoun and others over the supremacy of federal law. The second is Trump’s thought — one he first expressed to me in an interview for Time last year — that perhaps a deal of some kind could have averted the Civil War.”“The problem with the latter,” added Meacham, “is that any accommodation with the South would have to have ratified the continued existence of slavery in the old slaveholding states — which, to be fair, was a mainstream possibility in the prewar days. What finally drove secession was Lincoln’s refusal to allow the expansion of slavery westward. All fascinating, complicated stuff — but one has to wonder why the 45th president, who has plenty to do, is blithely relitigating what Shelby Foote called ‘the crossroads of our being.'”Rauchway also suggested that Trump might have been thinking about Jackson’s actions against former Vice President Calhoun.“To give the president the benefit of the doubt,” said Rauchway, “I imagine he is thinking there of the Nullification Crisis where Jackson faced down John C. Calhoun over the South Carolinian attempts to nullify a federal tariff law and that therefore Jackson is sometimes referred to as being a strong Unionist, which I suppose is fair enough. But at that point the issue of slavery wasn’t directly at issue or its expansion wasn’t directly an issue, and I don’t think Jackson would have been effective in dealing with that issue in any way.”There was also pushback against Trump’s musings that Jackson could have prevented the Civil War and his suggestion that the seventh president — whose Indian Removal Act essentially legalized genocide — had a “big heart.”“Andrew Jackson himself was a slaveholder and the Jacksonians were slaveholders and they despised the abolitionists,” said Rauchway, “so it’s hard for me to believe that they would have been able to prevent the Civil War. And actually it was Jacksonian policies – particularly those of James K. Polk, who styled himself as Young Hickory, as a direct heir to Andrew Jackson – which precipitated the Civil War. That’s entirely wrong in every respect.”“Jackson had a big heart for white farmers,” said Hemmer, “Less so for the American Indians he slaughtered and the African-Americans he enslaved. Given Trump’s own focus on white Americans over nonwhite Americans, it’s not surprising that he would fail to see the limits of Jackson’s big-heartedness.”

What needs to be emphasized every single day in this nightmarish, hellish "presidency" (or regime?) in which we find ourselves is that hateful, bigoted, ignorant, low-information voters "elected" a hateful, bigoted, ignorant, low-information "president" through the anti-democratic electoral college, not the popular vote. Will any conservative and/or Trump voter, beyond just a few handful, have the intellectual credibility to admit that we were right? That they deeply regret their vote? That they were scammed, hoodwinked, and bamboozled by a used car salesman? I doubt it. They couldn't admit we were right about Iraq; about financial deregulation; about tax cuts; about the ACA; about climate change, so why would they suddenly wise up now? When the stakes are this high, it's more important to be right than it is to be nice. As I've been saying for many months and years now, we're way past the point of having thoughtful, reasonable debate with thoughtful, reasonable people. In no way shape or form can this end well. Who better to evaluate presidents than historians? It's sad that Trump supporters are so brainwashed that they don't care what we think.

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Disclaimer: This is my personal blog. While I do my best to offer reasonable conclusions based on verifiable, peer reviewed evidence, I neither speak for my employers, nor do I require my students to read or agree with the thoughts expressed here. Opinions are my own.